As she walks alongside the Hudson River with her friend, a woman excitedly explains her intricate vision of what would give her happiness.

A disillusioned candy store owner feels burnt out with his current life and begins to project his past mistakes on the actions of a young thieving customer.

In this metafiction, the many lives of an unnamed man are scrutinized as he passes through millennia.

An accomplished but ineffectual columnist searches for fulfillment, until a death in the family causes him to question the family he took for granted.

An alcoholic housewife struggles with her family obligations and her addiction.

A poor, ever-hopeful couple that imagines itself on the brink of a windfall suffers setback after setback, until the husband has a revelation about what in life holds real value.

Having sacrificed his dream job to financially support his marriage, a man realizes there is sexual tension between his wife and his friend. Ultimately, he makes tough decisions about both his friendship and his marriage.

When an upstart young man dreams of bigger things than his job at the local mine, he finds his connection between his father and his best friend in peril.

A young woman wants to run away from her supernatural forest home and go with her boyfriend to the City. However, her grandmother forbids it as she worries the woman will lose the connection to herself and their spiritual powers.

In post-World War II Japan, a boy is raised by his frigid father without love and spends the rest of his life endlessly pursuing it.